Italian trumpet master Enrico Rava, whose album “Easy Living” marked a much-discussed return to ECM, has won the “European Musician of the Year Award” presented by France’s Académie du jazz.

The Académie, currently directed by Claude Carrière, and whose honorary presidents have included Stephane Grapelli, Jean Cocteau, and Charles Delauney, is a non-profit organization devoted to the promotion and diffusion of jazz throughout France and the rest of Europe.

An awards ceremony took place at Paris’s New Morning club on December 12th.